Cluster Map

February 21, 2012

When we got to the base, they asked all the Jewish fliers to stay behind. And there were quite a few of us, officers and enlisted men. And this Lieutenant Levine came out, he was the Intelligence officer, and he asked all of us to give him our dog tags so he could change the Hon the tag from Hebrew to either P or C for Protestant or Catholic. Because he told us point-blank that if we're shot down and they find the H on our dog tags, we will not live, we will not be put in a stalag. We will either be tortured to death or beaten to death or killed right away or sent, if we're lucky, to a concentration camp. And at that point, none of us would do it. None of us. Oh, I knew what the Nazis were doing. “Nobody knew,” that's bullcrap. We knew what they were doing to the Jews. We knew what they were doing to the Jews in 1941 and even in 1940. Come on. I have a lot of strong feelings about that. No, we knew it. And I knew that if I was going up there, I'd be in deep water if I got shot down. But my feeling was I wanted those sons of bitches to know that the bombs that are dropping, that there's a Jew up there doing it. That was my feeling. Nineteen years old, didn't know any better. I always had the feeling, you know, if we get hit I'll probably blow up anyway, so let them know it's a Jew. And that was the feeling. We didn't even question, there wasn't a guy that said, “Yeah, I'll do it.” We just said, “Fine,” and we walked out. I think he was proud of us. More than anything else, I think he was proud of us. And I'm proud of us when I think about it.

The first few missions, they gave us what we called milk runs. They wanted us to learn how to fly, how to fly in formation, when to clear our guns. That means no flak, not too much, no fighters. By my fifth mission, I realized a mensch ken derharget veren—a man can get himself killed.

(Ideally, that expression should be heard as if spoken with a faux, old world Jewish accent, as my father was wont to do. My father could speak Yiddish and would love to sprinkle his conversations with particularly evocative Yiddish expressions. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, but his parents spoke Yiddish in the house and I suspect my father and his two brothers understood Yiddish well before their parents caught on. When my sisters and I were growing up and my parents didn't want us to know what the adults were saying, they would “redt Yiddish.”)

Because what happens is...it happens to others. They crash. They get shot down. And, you know, you reach a point, and people don't talk about it because they don't like to, but when a plane blows up next to you in the air, you don't say, “Oh, poor Joe.” you say, “Boy, that was close! Thank God it wasn't us.”

Another feeling which I don't think people talk about, and this is a general feeling, is that when you fly and it's a big expanse of sky and you see enemy planes, you don't get that involved as in, “Oh, they're after me.” You actually feel like you're almost in a movie. It's that kind of feeling. You're in a movie. When you can shoot your guns, oh, it's a relief. You feel so much better you could do something. But when they're shooting flak and you see the puffs and you see planes hit and you see guys bail out, you just sit there because you can't move; the only way you can handle that is you...you just make it unreal. It's like you're in a big movie. And when you land and you get your coffee and you sit down, then you realize what you went through. Then the terror starts. And that's when guys would usually break down if they broke down. So by the fifth mission, we had lost enough planes so we were a lead crew already. They were glad my pilot had 500 hours so he could be a lead pilot. And that was basically it. And we flew, and we had some pretty rough ones.

One of the most miserable feelings you had was when you landed and were taxiing to your hard stand and the chief, the crew chief and the mechanics, were waiting for the planes that didn't make it, and you'd have to signal to let them know they went down. And you could just see them wilt, just like that. And that, that was a terrible feeling. After that a lot of things happened.

You know, guys got drunk and guys would do a lot of things they shouldn't have done, and that was the way they handled the pressure. Some of the guys—I was not a drinker and I didn't smoke, you know. I was what Mama would say “a good Jewish boy”--they would get big, big barrels—glass barrels—and they would make stills. You'd have guys drunk all the time. Murphy, who was my engineer, broke down. He couldn't take it beyond about thirty-something missions and he broke down. He had a fourteen-year-old daughter. He was about thirty-seven. To me that was an old man in those days. My pilot was twenty-five. I was a big nineteen. And Murphy, he just couldn't handle it. He would urinate in his pants all the time. If we were off one night, he'd be brought in by someone. “Is this Murphy's tent?” And he'd be drunk, and they'd throw him into the tent. He just couldn't take it.

(I suppose Murphy was too aware of his own mortality and what he was risking every time he strapped into his B-24. The attrition rate was so high that he must have realized he was on a suicide run every time he flew. When you are younger, 19 or 25, it is impossible to conceptualize your own death; besides, if you do go down, you die a hero. But when you're 37 and have a teenage daughter, the loss of her future might be too much to bear. I still can't imagine how these men could climb into their planes day after day while their friends and colleagues were dropping out of the sky in unimaginable numbers. The selflessness involved makes our current preoccupation with our own narcissism seem petty, shallow, and ultimately, meaningless.)

February 13, 2012

(This is my father's story, in his own words, of his time flying 50 missions, as a tail gunner, in a B-24 Liberator during WWII. This is from an interview he did for an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in downtown New York in 2003. My father passed away at the end of January and I am posting this as an homage to him, and to all the others who sacrificed so much for me and my country. The quiet courage on diplay is awe inspiring.

From time to time I will add some comments in parentheses and italics; all the rest is my father's voice. I can hear him still.

The B-24 Liberator: With a carrying capacity of 8,800 pounds of bombs, a top speed of 300 miles per hour, and a range of just over 2,000 miles, the B-24 Liberator was flown in more theaters of war than any other four-engine bomber in World Was II. By the end of the war, more than 18,000 had been built.

The gunner's job was never to shoot enemy planes down. You only fired at the planes as they were firing at you because you only had just so much ammo. You had to fire in three-second bursts. If you held it long, you were finished with your ammo. So your job was really to make sure to throw them off, because they were just as scared, I realize now, to come in at you. But your job was to basically shoot and make sure they don't get your plane. And that was basically your job.

We were up at Westover Field, Massachusetts. We'd spent a few days there talking and learning to be together and what about you and what about you? And of course as soon as I said the name Abramson, they gave me the Abie name—I didn't change my name till later. And we just got along well. We liked each other. We got along—it was all first-name basis. There were no officers, no enlisted men. It was just a bunch of guys who liked each other. We all learned in phase training how to fly the plane, how to do every other person’s job, because it was important if anybody got hit somebody should be able to do what you had to do. And so we practiced. We went down to Chatham Field, Georgia. This was still in 1943, around the end of 1943. We went to Chatham Filed, Georgia, where we spent months in training. Then one time we went down to Cuba and flew for ten days out of Cuba, a ten-day antisubmarine patrol, just to keep the crew knowing how the crew works.

I think most crews go along. Most crews, because that's what the air force wanted. If you got along together, you worked as a team. I mean, there was no, no safe place to hide. And I can just say for myself, I left with thirty-nine crews. That's 390 men. And 7 men came home when I came home. You'd make friends with a crew, and they were gone the next day. And all you knew was that every day you would check to see if you were flying.

(I used to marvel at that bit of information. My father went over with 390 men and 7 came home. I don't really know if he ever thought much about what that actually meant. But I know I thought about it, a lot. If he had been the 391st victim, or if we had lost the war, I wouldn’t be here. My father became a Psychoanalyst after the war and studied with Kurt and Alexandra Adler, Alfred Adler's son and daughter. He treated patients who were victims of trauma but I don't know if it ever occurred to him that his trauma [7 out of 390!] was as extreme as any of the civilians he treated for so many years. Maybe his sensitivity to his traumatized patients reflected an intuitive sense of kinship. I don't know. He told the stories in a matter of fact way; it is impossible to appreciate what it means to have gone over with so many and come home with so few, or at least it was impossible for me to appreciate on a deep level what that must have meant and been like to experience. I remember at the end of Saving Private Ryan, a note appeared on the screen to the effect that out of the first 5000 who landed at Normandy, only 15 survived the war, and I thought to myself, that was the same order of magnitude as my father faced. You could only have done that by not thinking too much; you would just do your job, ignore as much as possible the risks, and, perhaps, pray.)

We went overseas around April, 1944. My group, I realized, started in February. So I got there in April and started to fly my missions in May. The group we were assigned to had already been there in February. We were like a replacement crew at the time. To make a long story short, we were a lead crew after five missions. That was it. And when I was shot down, they made us come back and fly because they had no lead crews.

Nobody was prepared to fly. You knew you had to do it so you did it. I mean, that was all. There was always a fear, a terror inside. When we got there, a before we got there, a colonel spoke to us and he told us, “Look to the right of you, look to the left of you. Take a good look, because two out of three of you are not coming back.” I remember saying to myself, “I'm going to miss you guys.” Don't ask me why I said that. And that was what happened basically. In fact, worse. You get the idea—I think there was a feeling that I wouldn't get through. I wouldn’t make fifty. Now I honestly had that feeling. I can't even describe it. You know it's going to happen and you know you have to do your job, so you do your job and that’s what happened.

When we got to the base, they asked all the Jewish fliers to stay behind.

February 07, 2012

My father passed away at the age of 86 on Sunday, January 29. He had been ill for quite some time, and dodged death on at least 2 occasions in the last few years, a story I will tell in due time. He always appreciated dark humor and I used to joke with him that he was on "injury time", the indeterminate time soccer matches continue after the 90 minute game time is up. In reality, however, my father had been living on bonus time since 1944. He was modest about his service in WWII but through the years he told his grandchildren, two of whom subsequently entered the military (and one more who plans to follow in their footsteps), some of the stories of his time. In 2003, the Jewish Museum in New York City interviewed my father for an exhibit featuring American Jews who fought in WWII. A book commemorating these men, Ours to Fight For, was published as part of the exhibit and included a chapter on my father.

In the next several posts I plan on transcribing his story, with some additional commentary (in parentheses) as an homage to a wonderful father, husband of 64 years to my mother, devoted grandfather and great-grandfather. In a very real way, without the job that my father and his generation performed, and the great sacrifices so many of them made, we would quite literally not be here today. Here is my father's story, in his own words:

"I wanted those sons of bitches to know"

Bernard Branson U.S. Army Air Corps

I graduated at sixteen, in 1941. There was a war on, so what you did was you waited to get old enough to go into the army. I was working as a Western Union messenger. I used to work down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard delivering telegrams. I remember seeing the HMS Barham come in. It was a British battleship, which had been pretty shot up, and I would go down there and look at it and I couldn't wait to get into the service.

There was a course in Quoddy, Maine, for about four or five months. I got to Maine and the I worked my way out to St. John in Canada. And I walked into the RCAF and I said, "Oh, here I am. I'm ready to fly." And they just sent me home. They laughed. I must have been seventeen, just about seventeen. And they said, "We're not taking Americans. You're not Canadian, you can't go in. You've got to go back and you've got to tell the Americans to take you in." So I went back and I had to wait until I hit eighteen to get into the air corps because there were no enlistments any more. And at eighteen, as soon as I hit eighteen, I said, "Take me in. I'm ready." My brother was already in by then.

I was a very thin little kid. The marines wanted me. And the airborne wanted me. And I'm looking, and I said, "I don't want them. I want the Army Air Corps." That's all I knew, was the Army Air Corps. And the marines said, "Well, you're going into the marines," when I was getting my physical. I said, "My mother's going to hate you for this. I want to be an air corps man." And he stamped the thing and I looked. It said "Army." And I'm like, Oy!, that's what I wanted. I'd always wanted the army ever since I was a kid. And I went from there, I went to Camp Upton, and the first day they get us our uniforms, you know, all the shots and stuff like that. To make a long story short, I went down to Miami Beach. That's how I found out I was in the air force. As the train went out and the officer came through, I noticed he had the air force badge. And I went, "Oh! Everything is working out." And then my mother made me swear-and that was the only thing-on my father's grave that I would not fly as a pilot. I would not try to be a pilot.

She has a thing about the military. She had a son in the military. He was already in, my older brother. He was a radar man when it was still top secret. And she knew what I wanted to do, but she made me swear. So when I took the exam and they wanted to send me to pilot school, I couldn’t really tell then that I couldn’t do it. It was like, you know, I had sworn on my father's grave. I don't know how you describe it but it was a … it was a real promise. I made the promise and didn't really realize it. I'm like that. If I give you my word, I'm, I'm a dead man. I don't change it. She thought I'd be on the ground. I never told her there were gunners. So the guy said, “Well, then you're going to gunnery school.' I said, “I'll take it.”

You stay about two or three weeks in tents waiting to go to class, and then ti's about a six-week course in gunnery. First week is sitting and practicing. The second week is shooting skeet on trucks. I was a good skeet shooter. I never shot a gun in my life, but I was a marksman. Don't ask me how. I was good. Till one time I was so good that one guy who had been a corporal in 1938-George Ostamulow was his name- said, “Boy, look at that Abie shoot. Look at that. He, that Abie, he can't miss. He can't miss.” He said, “Jesus, that fucking Jew boy, he can't miss. Don't you miss, Jew boy?” And then I missed. I missed two and I turned around. I just nicely said, “Oh, fuck you,” and turned around and I got the rest of them. That was about the extent of any anti-Semitism. You couldn't really call it that, because when I came back form overseas I met him, and this guy couldn’t … he was so thrilled to see another guy alive that he just hugged me. We were friends.

The crews' names were put together. And then what they did, you went and you met each other and you were given three months to either get together and get close or drop out of the crew. No questions asked. And we, we just hit it off. Joe and I were in the same crew, and we met Irving Simon, who was another Jewish boy-most of the crews had a Jew somewhere in there, you know. And very luckily, my pilot … I think I'm here because I had a good pilot. Calvin hall. He had flown with the RCAF, flown dive-bombers, and then switched over and became an instructor on B-24s. And so when he came to us, he had 500 hours on B-24s, and that's a lot of hours. He was one of the few guys who could stall a B-24 and bring it out of a stall. Nobody could do that. That's how wonderful the guy was. And that's why I can talk about one of the worst experiences I had in my life.

Don Gray was my copilot. He didn’t make it through. They took him away because he started to see enemy fighters all over the sky. He couldn’t, he couldn’t even control the plane. And we had an engineer. He had an appendectomy and we got another engineer, a guy named Johnny Murphy who was an old man and an alcoholic. He became a problem. They took him off the crew. And then there was Bob Polk, who had been a lumberjack. He was a front-turret gunner. And Bob Polk was a very good Catholic. He would go out and sleep with anything that walked, and then he would go to confession. He didn’t care what age. We, most of us, got disgusted with him. And Earl Everett, who was the shortest man in the air force. He was four feet eleven and a half inches tall. You had to be five feet. He just got in. He was our bombardier. Our navigator we had for a very short time, and then when we were over there we received another navigator, a flying office called Bill Fidraki. And he was hit over a target where the nose gunner was killed--his eye was shot out—but he had a choice to pull the nose gunner in and try to save him or try to save his eye. He tried to save the nose gunner, so he went home with a decoration. But thank God he lived. He wanted to be a doctor. And that was us.

February 06, 2012

I have been on blogging hiatus for almost a year. A lot has happened in my life since then. I took a new job, became a grandfather twice, and suffered a difficult loss. I do not know if I will be resuming blogging on a regular basis, though the world certainly offers innumerable opportunities for someone to try to make some limited sense out of events, but I do plan on a series of blog posts devoted to a very wonderful man, my father, who passed away recently. My posts are not meant to evoke sadness but more to marvel at the quiet heroism of one man among a great many who did their duty to their country and deserve to be remembered and thanked. My father was buried in a military funeral on Long Island; the ceremony was deeply moving and I think he would have been pleased.

I am sorry for my silence in the last year. I meant my break from blogging to be a short one and kept expecting, "any day now", to resume. Events have a way of changing one's plans. In any case, I don't know how long my series of posts will be; I have some interesting stories to tell. Whether or not I will then resume blogging regularly I do not know; I miss the conversation here and the play of ideas with and from my commenters, so I do hope to get back to blogging soon; time will tell.